Rimsiders
by Tacks
Summary: Not everywhere in the galaxy is as clean cut and idealistic as the federation. A fiery bajoran rebel falls in with a rag tag group of smugglers in the Gama quadrant; an exiled romulan commander, a hot shot pilot on the run from federation justice, an engineer with connections in to ferengi organized crime, and an alien soldier battling his personal demons.


The cargo container ground to a halt and Eiren woke up blearily. It's tough to sleep when you're jammed into a shipping container with thirty other bajoran prisoners like a pack of animals, but if there's one thing you learn in a cardassian prison camp it's to take what sleep you can when you can get it. Who knows when you'll randomly be assigned a 24 hour labor shift.

Instinctively she looked around for the other Maquis members that were being shipped out that day. Several of them met her gaze dejectedly. Still, an air of subtle hopefulness pervaded the container that even a cardassian overseer's boot couldn't completely extinguish. With the treaty already signed by both the post-Dominion cardassian government and the Federation it was a hopeful era for the prisoners in the work camps.

Well, most of them anyway.

All the naturalized bajorans and Starfleet personnel who were being held would be released after a gentle debriefing, prisoners of war free to resume their lives. The story was different for the Maquis resistance members in the camps. They had done what they had to every step of the way, and yet what they did made them enemies of both Cardassia and the Federation. No, for them release only meant transfer from a cardassian labor camp to a Federation penal colony.

Granted, after an experience like a cardassian POW camp the Federation penal colony would be like a vacation. And Eiren knew that most of her former Maquis compatriots would be perfectly happy to molder there until their sentences were up.

But Eiren had other plans. She had no intention of sitting quietly in a penal settlement, cardassian _or_ Federation. She stealthily felt beneath the hem of her rough, shapeless prisoner's shirt for the tiny device sewn there. She'd constructed it herself from components that she'd stolen, salvaged, or bartered for from the other prisoners. She ran her fingers over its smooth surface, once again memorizing the location of the tiny button and the miniscule nodes of the power transfer jack. It had enough power for one use. One shot at freedom.

There was a clang as the cargo container was none too gently interfaced with the station's docking port and the prisoners were thrown forward roughly. Eiren cursed as she pushed herself up. Just one last example of gentle cardassian hospitality. There was the hiss of exchanging air and for an instant a bolt of fear shot through her. Would the cardassians be so bold as to intentionally mis-dock? Vent them all out into space in a last petty act of vengeance and call it an accident?

But the door slid open and there was the brief flash of a force field being deactivated. Despite herself Eiren sighed in relief. Beyond the bulk head she could see the all too familiar curves and struts of cardassian architecture transformed by the bright light of a Federation controlled station.

Eiren had been on Deep Space 9 before and it always struck her how odd it looked see cardassian rooms and hallways in full light. In the half dim cardassian environment they were sinister, like looming thugs leaning ominously over you. In the light they were almost elegant.

Just outside the container a pair of cardassian soldiers stood with disruptors trained on them. Across from the cardassians a pair of bajoran security officers had their own phasers out. Eiren got the feeling that the security officers were there to watch the cardassians as much as the prisoners.

In short order they had been herded out of the shipping container and into a holding cell. A force field flashed across the entrance and Eiren fought her way to the front. She palmed the device hidden in her shirt. Her nerves were on fire with anticipation, her senses in overdrive as she waited for her chance.

The bajoran security officers kept their phasers out until the cardassians transported back to their ship. Eiren tensed, this was her chance!

But before she could enact her plan the door slid open and a bajoran woman flanked by two humans in Starfleet uniforms entered the brig. She a colonel's command pips on her shoulder, and wore a standard maroon bajoran command uniform. Eiren thought she might have recognized her but couldn't remember where she'd seen her.

She gave a short speech to the assembled prisoners, welcoming them to the station, assuring them that their trials were over, expressing her heartfelt sorrow at their imprisonment. Eiren suppressed a sneer. The colonel gave them a speech about freedom while two Starfleet officers stood over her shoulder waiting to take the Maquis prisoners into custody.

Eiren waited until her speech was wrapping up, her nervousness mounting. And then her moment came. The colonel stepped forward almost up to the force field and Eiren's hand whipped forward. She hit the button on her tiny makeshift device and then jammed both conductive terminals into the force field. One of the bajorans shouted and raised his weapon but the colonel was faster.

In an instant her phaser was out and she blasted away at the force field. She was a second too early though. The golden beam hit while the force field was still up and dissipated harmlessly. In the meantime an escalating pitch could be heard. The field generators whined as Eiren's device did its work, folding the energy matrix in a feedback loop. The pitch rose to a scream and Eiren wormed her way back into the mass of prisoners just as the officers on the other side of the field dove for cover.

There was a flash and an explosion as the force field generators overloaded. The front row of prisoners were bowled back into the others and the bajoran security staff blinked, dazed. Eiren was ready for the blast and had braced herself. Her ears were ringing but she quickly jumped to her feet and dashed out of the cell past groaning, disoriented prisoners. She quickly bent over the fallen form of the colonel and relieved her of her phaser. The colonel tried to grasp her feebly but she was still dazed from the explosion.

"Wait, don't...we can help you." She said, struggling to regain her feet.

But Eiren didn't listen. She dashed to the nearest maintenance crawl space and quickly phasered off the access panel. She shimmied forward on her hands and knees as fast as she could. She could hear the station staff behind her coming to and corralling the prisoners again. Maybe spending all day crawling through a cardassian mining tunnel was good for something after all. The maintenance tube took a turn and the sounds behind her faded away as she disappeared into the ducts.

…

Eiren knew that the station would be on full alert looking for her and so she kept moving, sticking to the maintenance ways where they wouldn't be able to detect her with their internal sensors. Eventually she fetched up in a small alcove with a replicator access terminal. For anyone else it was a dead end but for Eiren it was as good as terminal access to their central computer core.

When she had been caught she'd been slicing through an encrypted cardassian military database like a neutrino through plasma. Her team hadn't even been caught because the cardassians detect her hacking attempt. One of her support teams had come under fire, panicked, and led cardassian troops right back to the command center that they'd occupied.

She cursed softly under her breath the way she always did when she recalled the incident. Damn infantry. She shook her head and re focused on her work. Slender fingers quickly flicked over an array of iso-linear rods, swapping, replacing and rotating them as her eyes flicked back and forth between the access panel and the computer display. She clapped her hands and rubbed her palms together as the screen lit up with limited systems access.

Without a real terminal all she could do was pull up was a systems diagnostic and inventory routine. That was all she needed though. She quickly navigated through to a list of currently docked vessels. She was looking for something non-Starfleet, leaving soon, and hopefully headed for Bajor. Her first priority was getting clear of the station though. If she could stow away on some freighter she could double back and get home at her leisure.

There was a time when the prospect of being adrift in the universe with no destination or plan other than to keep her hide free and in one piece would have terrified her. After eighteen months in a cardassian labor camp nothing terrified her. It had bothered her a little when she realized it wasn't bravery. It was numbness.

Her eyes flicked over the screen as she finally picked her target. It was a mid sized freighter bound for the gamma quadrant. Fairly typical for a ship of its class. Lots of cargo space, minimal armament, impressive warp engines, designation _ISF Ko'Rozen_. Big enough to stow away on without being noticed, small enough not to have Starfleet standard intrusion detection and countermeasures. Her other options looked like they'd be easier to sneak aboard but one was headed for Betazed and the other for Vulcan. Telepaths and naturally gifted investigators aren't exactly conducive to fugitive flight.

…

Eiren crept through the dark stacks of cargo containers, her ears pricked for any movement. When she had arrived in the hangar there was a ship to ship transfer in progress. She expected the _Ko'Rozen _to be taking on fuel and supplies, maybe picking up cargo from the station's stores. Oddly enough it was transferring sealed crates from an old nausicaan outrunner into its cargo hold via a mechanical conveyor belt. The two ships were settled into the hangar facing way from each other connected by the conveyor.

Luckily for her the arrangement made it extremely easy to sneak aboard. She kept her head down and moved with the line of crates as she ran at a half crouch towards the loading hatch. An alien with pale green, almost greyish skin and a pair of nausicaans in grubby uniforms were standing in the hold of the nausicaan outrunner loading crates on to the conveyor. Eiren kept their eyes fixed on them, ready to bolt if any of them turned around. None of them did and she heaved a sigh of relief as she melted into the darkness of the _Ko'Rozen's _cargo hold.

The ship was surprisingly sleek, especially compared to the spiky, bulky nausicaan ship. It lacked the hard edges and down swept nacelles of a Federation runabout, its outer hull was comprised of smooth aerodynamic lines that met in a stub nose at the bow of the craft and flared to a powerful looking central warp drive at the rear. Obviously designed for both atmospheric and space flight, the lines of the ship reminded Eiren of Vulcan ship design, possibly Romulan.

She waited until all of the crates had been loaded, secreted behind a bulk head at the rear of the cargo hold. From time to time she peeked out to get an idea of what was going on in the hangar. The grey skinned alien seemed to be in charge, directing the nausicaans as they loaded the heavy crates. That surprised her a little considering that nausicaans were notoriously unmanageable and resistant to any authority short of physical force. The grey alien was certainly large, he towered a full head above the larger of the nausicaans. But Eiren could see that he was wearing a full body grav harness similar to the ones that Elaysians needed to wear in full gravity environments. It made sense that he would be so big, light gravity worlders had less of a restriction on how big they could grow to. She was just surprised that he wasn't flat on his back with all the mass that he must be carrying in a full gravity environment.

At any moment she expected a federation security team to burst into the hangar looking for her. Evidently the hubbub on the rest of the station had filtered through into the hangar. The movements of the nausicaans became jerky and rushed, practically throwing crates onto the conveyor belt until the bulky alien made them load more carefully. There was something furtive in their movements. For all that they were just loading boxes in the brightly lit hangar of a federation station it looked like they were at a crossroads at midnight trying not to be seen as they buried some unfortunate secret.

Eiren hid at the back of the cargo bay watching until the last crate had been loaded. The green skinned alien flipped open an old style communicator and spoke into it, although Eiren was too far away to hear what he said. Immediately the rear cargo bay doors closed, leaving Eiren in darkness. For a moment panic began to grip her but a moment later dim running lights illuminated along the walls of the bay and she moved out of her hiding place.

The familiar sounds of un-docking and takeoff sounded from outside the ship and Eiren felt her heart leap. She had made it! She would stow away on the freighter until it reached its destination and then jump ship. She'd buy, steal, or sneak her way back to the Alpha Quadrant and then home to Bajor. It didn't occur to her to think of what she'd do when she got there.

But as she sat on one of the crates her curiosity began to get the better of her. A Vulcan freighter trading with nausicaan freebooters? What were they transporting, and why not simply beam the cargo from one ship to the other? It would be faster and easier, and wouldn't require docking at the station. But it would leave a record in the pattern buffers, a record that could be tracked.

_Contraband? _Eiren thought.

Her mischievous streak manifested itself and she couldn't help but slide off the crate she was sitting on and turn towards it expectantly. It was encrypted with a tri-phasic duotronic lock. High security for a simple cargo container. Most border inspection officials would have to wait until a decryption specialist could crack it or send it to a larger star base to be analyzed. But for a hacker like Eiren it was like lifting out the layer of gauzy tissue in a box of tjorkan sweets.

Her fingers flickered over the control panel and in no time flat she had it opened and was jockeying with the isolinear chips inside. She was so absorbed that she didn't hear the cargo bay door open, or the stealthy approach of feet behind her.

Eiren twisted the final rod back into place and was rewarded by a click and a hiss as the cargo lid popped open. She looked inside and her eyes widened, a tiny gasp escaped her throat. A half second later the main cargo bay lights snapped on and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She whirled with a squeak only to come face to face with a disruptor leveled at her nose.

A squat Ferengi stood behind her, a furious expression lighting his already gnarled brow. He was short, even for his race, with enormous ears and a snaggle of teeth presently pulled into a snarl. He wasn't wearing any sort of uniform, just a dull colored tunic and a matching wrap around the back of his head between his ears. Around his waist jangled a massive utility belt jammed with every sort of tool Eiren could imagine. In one hand he held the Ferengi style disruptor and in the other a hand held comm unit like the one she'd seen the alien supervising the loading using.

"Don't. Move." He growled, his words laden with menace.

"I can explai-" Eiren began but he cut her off by jerking the disruptor into her face.

"Don't. Talk." He said.

Eiren raised her hands and clamped her mouth shut. The ferengi looked ready to shoot at any moment. In a panic she wondered if word had gotten to the ships on the docking ring that station security was hunting for her.

With his small black eyes narrowed in suspicion he flicked the communicator open.

"Ruck to bridge. Captain, you'd better get down to the cargo bay." He said, keeping the phaser trained on Eiren.

"What is it now, Ruck?" A sharp female voice came through the communicator. Her words were stressed and curt in a way that suggested someone long used to being obeyed instantly and without question.

"DS9 just hailed us and are requesting that we assume a holding pattern. Some kind of security concern. If they're on to us..." She said, trailing off.

"I don't know if they're on to us, but I've just caught a stowaway snooping through _my _cargo bay!" The Ferengi Ruck snarled, nearly shouting into the comm.

"What!?" The sharp female voice barked. A torrent of expletives began pouring out of the communicator followed by a brisk "On my way. Don't let him escape."

"Actually..." Ruck began, looking Eiren over.

Her face flushed and she realized how she must look. She was still in her ratty prisoner's garb, her elbows and knees skinned from the past several hours crawling through conduits, her frame bony from a cardassian prison diet. She started to lower her hands to cover herself a bit but Ruck menaced her with the disruptor and she put them back up by her ears. Her shoulders were starting to get tired.

A minute or two later the cargo bay doors slid open again and a pair of mismatched figures strode through.

The first was a tall woman in a form fitting jumpsuit. For a moment Eiren thought she might be Vulcan. She had pointed ears and close cropped black hair with a high, sculpted brow and a slender jaw that led to attractive lips currently set in a thin line of displeasure. But even if the faint ridges along her forehead tapering down into a shallow v above her shapely nose didn't give her away the harsh set of her shoulders and the imperiously superior look in her eyes marked her as Romulan.

At her shoulder stood the greenish-grey skinned alien that Eiren had seen overseeing the loading dock. He was even more formidable up close. Towering a head and a half over even the tall Romulan woman, his body was draped with an impressive musculature visible even under his clothing and the gravity harness that he wore, perhaps a result of moving around in full gravity for an extended period of time. His bald head, which at a distance had seemed to be covered by stubble, now appeared to be covered in dark spots, each one raised a tiny bit from his head. It reminded Eiren of nothing so much as a tiny cleared forest, the trees cropped off next to the ground and leaving short stumps.

The romulan woman radiated an air of command and both the ferengi and the large alien glanced at her for instructions. Her sharp eyes took in the scene at a glance, flicking over Eiren's form and the nervous Ferengi.

"Put that away. You look like a fool." She said brusquely. The ferengi tucked his disruptor back into its holster with a scowl and a soft harrumph.

"And you." She rounded on Eiren and crossed her arms, tapping a foot as she looked her up and down. Eiren felt like she was a vorren being sized up by a butcher to be skinned and cleaned.

"They're looking for you, back on the station. We had to cut our meet short and disembark because of you. They ordered all non-federation vessels to de-couple from the station to prevent you from sneaking aboard. Not that it did them any good. Typical Federation sloppiness." She snorted.

"Look, if you'll just let me..." Eiren began.

"Shut up." The severe Romulan snapped.

"You've caused me more than enough trouble already."

She flicked open her communicator but kept her eye on Eiren. For her part Eiren could feel her fiery temper struggling to break free. It was the one thing the cardassians could never break and it had caused her more trouble than it was worth. In a minute or two the disruptors at her captor's belts wouldn't be enough of a deterrent to prevent her from giving them a piece of her mind. Her anger cooled into an icy panic as the Romulan spoke.

"Teks, we've caught our stowaway. Hail DS 9 and tell them that we're ready to beam her over at their convenience." She said.

A moment of dead air reigned over the comm link before an upbeat reply crackled through.

"Wait, it's a girl? Is she cute?"

As if on cue all three crew members groaned. Ruck slapped a hand to his forehead, the tall romulan woman pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes shut in exasperation, and the massive green skinned alien chuckled like a parent watching his toddler trying to refract a triaxilating signal through a holo-conduit.

"It doesn't _matter _what she _looks_ like, you..." The romulan began through clenched teeth but at that point Eiren's temper snapped.

"LOOK!" She said, stamping her foot and snarling as she marched forward.

The ferengi jumped and the romulan took a reflexive step back, but the green skinned alien's response was instant. He moved faster than she could follow with her eyes. In one smooth motion that would put the fastest quick draw artists in the Maquis to shame he whipped his disruptor from its holster and leveled it at her head. As if by magic any traces of mirth drained from his features. His eyes weren't angry or nervous or burning with that anticipation that all fighters feel right before a brawl. They faded to a dead expression like they'd been plucked from a corpse and grafted onto his face.

Eiren gulped. The barrel of the disruptor wavered inches from her forehead, she had to cross her eyes to see the emitter. It was the most enormous hand disruptor she'd ever seen, a bulky pistol style weapon with an exaggerated coolant magazine that made it look more like a miniature anti-ship cannon. But for the first time she had the initiative and she couldn't give it up if she expected to get out of this situation alive.

"You _don't _want to do that." She said, nodding towards the Romulan woman's communicator.

"And why not?" She said, arcing an imperious eyebrow.

"Because I know what your cargo is." Eiren said smugly, stepping aside to reveal the cargo crate that she had cracked into.

The lid was still thrown open and a squat device crouched there. Green indicator panels blinked dimly and a faint mist of coolant exhaust swirled in the bottom of the crate.

"That's a thaleron generator. Weapons grade. _Highly_ illegal. If they caught you with just _one_ of those they'd take your ship and throw you in a penal colony on some world with double grav and no atmo. And I don't think the rest of these are filled with self sealing stem bolts." She said, waving at the identical crates stacked around the cargo hold.

It explained why they used a mechanical conveyor belt instead of simply beaming the cargo over. If anything went wrong they could destabilize the generators and destroy half the station.

The romulan's face tightened in fury. Her eyes blazed for an instant and then a cool veneer of romulan control settled over them.

"I see. This makes things much simpler then. Noren, take her to the nearest airlock and vent her into space."

The massive alien, Noren, nodded grimly and took a step forward. Panic settled over Eiren. Clearly she hadn't thought her plan all the way through. Noren reached out to take her by the arm and she tried to struggle but found that his grasp inescapable. It wasn't like wrestling against a stronger opponent, her pulling away and him pulling back more strongly. He simply closed his hand to a certain radius around her arm and held it there. Eiren got the impression that if he really wanted to he could simply continue squeezing and break her arm like a toothpick.

He made a motion as if to haul her away when the romulan woman's communicator crackled again.

"Uuuh, boss? You may wanna hold off on that. It looks like the station got wise to her stowing away somewhere before they had all the ships disembark. I'm picking up some pretty heavy scanning, they're checking all the orbiting ships for life signs. They haven't scanned us yet, but they're gonna." The same upbeat sounding voice said.

The romulan cursed and Eiren stopped struggling.

"Wait! You need me. I can get you out of this!" She said.

"How?" The romulan hissed, her eyes narrowed in displeasure.

"They'll scan you and see an extra life sign that isn't on your crew manifest plus a hold full of shielded cargo crates. Pretty suspicious. There's no way you'll get out of this without at least being searched. But if you can get me a subspace link to their network I can crack in and ghost an alternate version of your manifest into their database."

The romulan arced her slender eyebrow in an expression of typical romulan disdain.

"Federation security is foolproof. Everyone knows that. And even if you could get into their system they'd detect the attempt within minutes."

"Pfft. Federation security is _hardly _foolproof. But even if it is it would give you enough time to get away. And it's better than having your ship impounded, isn't it?" Eiren asked.

For a moment the romulan hovered in indecision until Noren spoke up.

"Shale, whatever you decide we have to do it quickly. If we run now they'll have a tractor on us before we could get half a kilometer." He said. His voice was deep and gravelly, with a sonorous quality that made Eiren think his race had a different vocal construction than most humanoids.

Shale looked between Eiren and the open crate before nodding decisively.

"Bring her. Ruck, get this place locked down. If they scan us I don't want them to pick up one Bq of thaleron radiation." She said sharply.

Ruck scowled but obeyed, mumbling something about unappreciated genius as he produced a radiation neutralizer from his bulky tool belt and moved towards the crate. Noren released Eiren's arm and politely gestured for her to precede him. She knew the reason he didn't bother restraining her. She had seen how fast he was. Being anywhere within his line of sight while he was armed was as good as having a disruptor pointed right at her.

As they walked Eiren got a good view of the ship's interior, mentally filing away hiding niches and calculating escape routes by force of habit. The curving romulan style bulkheads provided lots of dim niches along the corridors. The light level had been lifted from the usual romulan half darkness but there were still lots of hiding places. Towards the rear of the ship Eiren could see what she assumed was the engineering section, with cargo in the belly and crew quarters above that. Noren directed Eiren towards the sleek, curving forward section and onto the bridge.

The bridge itself was an interesting structure. The back half was a fairly standard command deck with a captain's chair, tactical station, navigation, comms, and sensors. The front half had been heavily modified, there was a sunken section filled with cobbled together tech from a dozen different races configured like a fighter cockpit. There were blinking readouts and displays, a holographic HUD, and rather than the typical LCARS command console a tactical joystick and throttle configuration had been added.

A lanky human sat in the pilot's seat and twisted around curiously when the bridge door slid open. He was tall and skinny, with big hands and dexterous, animate fingers. His face was slender and clever, with a high forehead and a long nose under thick eyebrows. He wasn't a handsome man, his features seemed just a bit haphazard on his face. His nose a bit too long, his eyes a bit too close together, his chin a bit too deep. But as Eiren and Shale walked onto the bridge he broke into a wide grin. His eyes sparkled with humor and everything pulled into place, the expression transforming awkward features to a charming, laughing quirkiness.

"Definitely cute." He said with a grin. Eiren recognized the voice that had been speaking over the communicator, Teks.

Eiren's face flushed and Shale let out an exasperated snort.

"Now is _hardly_ the time for your usual shenanigans. I won't hesitate to hose you down. Now, give me a status report." She said.

"The station's been scanning the orbiting ships for extra life signs. I moved us into an innocent looking docking orbit that incidentally keeps us ahead of their scans but they'll get to us eventually. So, you wanna run or what? I can probably get the jump on 'em and get a little distance 'fore they get a tractor on us. Then there ain't much I can do, it's just _Rosie's_ engines vs the stations field emitters. I'm on thin ice with Ruck already, he ain't gonna be happy with me if I tear his baby in half after he just got her patched back up again." Teks said, turning back to his impressive piloting array and adjusting some minor controls.

"We're going to try something else. Maintain orbit and keep me apprised of our status. There." Shale said to Eiren, pointing towards a nearby console.

Eiren cracked her fingers and set to work, well aware that her life depended on her actions. The romulan style control took a minute to get used to but soon enough her fingers were flying over the display. She sent a coded request to the station's servers piggy backed on an innocuous navigation data request. If anyone was paying attention they'd see that the signal was taking up about eight times as much bandwidth as it should but she was banking on the station's operators being busy looking for her instead of double checking routine navigation requests.

It only took her a moment to bypass the security filters on the cargo manifests. Shipments of andorian pears and qunar weren't exactly classified federation secrets. She quickly thumbed through the database until she found the _Ko'Rozen_ listed. She tampered with the cargo manifests and changed their declared cargo from a shipment of bajoran grain to some inert radioactive test samples bound for the Daystrom institute. It would look perfectly harmless but it would justify the shielded containers. No, on second though she changed the destination to a fictional agricultural research center on star base 418 in the Gama quadrant. The Daystrom Institute was high profile enough that it may cause a second look.

"They're scanning the last couple of ships now. Better get a jump on it." Teks said from his console.

Eiren redoubled her efforts, her fingers flying over the console. Droplets of sweat popped out on her forehead as she worked. She maneuvered over to the crew roster and wasn't surprised to see that Shale, Noren, Ruck and Teks were all listed under aliases. She added herself to the ship's crew compliment under a false name. The federation would scan their ship expecting five life signs and they'd see five life signs. Then she began the process of backing out through their systems, erasing or muddling all the logs and subroutines that she had accessed. She did a quick job of it, anyone going through their systems would see what she'd done right away. But it only had to look good for long enough for them to get away.

"They're scanning us." Teks announced.

Behind her Shale tensed. Eiren felt like she had crawled into a cranny to hide from a cardassian overseer and was waiting with baited breath to see if he would discover her hiding place or move on. Of course there was no sirens, no bells and whistles, it was just a simple scan. But that somehow made the tension worse. They wouldn't know right away if they'd been found out. Silence reigned on the bridge for a long moment as they waited for a federation hail.

After a long moment Teks nodded solemnly to Shale. Perhaps it was Eiren's imagination but she thought she saw her release a tiny sigh of relief, the tiniest crack in her perfectly severe romulan facade. Teks maintained their orbit for a minute or two before pulling gently away.

He began weaving a lazy pattern through the sparse field of orbiting ships and pulling casually towards the outside of the pack. Shale's hand tightened on the armrest of her chair and from the tactical station Noren stepped forward and began running a truncated ship prep.

"What happens now?" Eiren asked nervously, staring at the view screen.

"That depends on how well your slicing job holds up." Shale said grimly.

"Noren, how long until we're out of tractor range?" She asked.

"Not long now. At our present rate less than a minute."

"Good. Teks, keep it slow and steady. All we have to do is..." Shale was cut off by the terrifying chirp of an incoming hail.

"Audio only." She said tersely.

Teks hit a control and a voice that Eiren recognized as the colonel that had been in charge of receiving the prisoners came over the speakers, full of restrained fire.

"Cargo vessel _Ko'Rozen, _you are not cleared for departure, please resume your previous orbit." She said. Her words carried a tone like she was trying not to snap.

"Unfortunately that won't be possible. Our cargo is…" Shale began while Eiren frantically typed on her console. A message popped up on Shale's command HUD and she continued without missing a beat.

"...A series of rapidly decaying isotope samples bound for the GQ-DS-418 research station. It is imperative that we get underway at once in order to maintain our delivery schedule."

"Look, I don't care _what _you…and why aren't we receiving any video? We aren't detecting any malfunctions or anomalies that would prevent visual communication. You are to hold position while we double check your…" Her voice cut off as Shale killed the comm line.

"Do it!" She shouted, pointing at Teks.

"Boring conversation anyway." He replied with a grim chuckle.

The deck lurched for an instant before the compensators kicked in and Eiren grabbed for her console to steady herself. Teks gunned the throttle and dove hard just as the slender line of a tractor beam sprang from one of DS9's pylons to ensnare the back half of the ship. The floor lurched again and Eiren was thrown forward.

"Ruck, buddy, you gotta give me a boost!" Teks hollered into his comm.

"The engine won't take this! You are a maniac! I can't believe she lets you sit at the helm! I'm going to wring your scrawny little…" Ruck's furious voice poured onto the bridge, a tirade interspersed with ferengi expletives. But whatever he said he had to be doing something in the engine room because Eiren saw power levels spike for an instant.

That instant was all Teks needed. He jammed his joystick forward and the ship jerked downwards, not enough to break free of the beam, but that wasn't what Teks was aiming for. He dove towards a bulky andorian freighter and Eiren gasped as it loomed up in the view screen, they came so close to colliding with it that she swore she could hear the screech of metal on metal. But at the last second Teks turned the ship over and dove behind it, using its hull to block the tractor beam.

The andorian ship jerked for an instant as the beam came into contact with it but died a moment later. The station had cut off the beam rather than reel in the wrong ship. The _Ko'Rozen_ shot forward like a bolt from a slingshot as the opposing force of the beam died. Teks whooped like a schoolboy and pumped a fist into the air. Shale slammed her fist on her armrest in triumph and even stoic Noren smiled just a little. Only Ruck's tirade of profanity remained unabated.

"Get us out of here." Shale commanded, settling back in her chair like a self-satisfied cat.

"You got it boss." Teks said, making a beeline for the wormhole.

"Captain, the station is launching pursuit craft. Federation runabout class." Noren informed them solemnly.

"They'll never catch us. Take us into the wormhole." Shale said.

She pushed herself out of the captain's chair and marched around to stand in front of Eiren, her arms folded over her chest. Her imperious romulan eyes looked her up and down once more, weighing and judging. This time they crinkled ever so slightly in an approval that Shale quickly wiped from her face.

"That was a nice hack." She said, tapping a finger against her lower lip.

"You aren't much to look at but you're scrappy and resourceful. You think quickly on your feet and you don't panic. I like that. I can use that. So what do you say? Do you want a job?" She asked.

Behind her on the view screen the wormhole blossomed, a gateway to a largely uncharted region of space. Wild, full of promise and danger. Eiren had never seen it from so close. Teks was grinning at her from the pilot's seat and Noren stood with arms crossed, a passive expression on his face but one eyebrow arced upwards curiously. Shale extended her hand and Eiren hesitated.

These people were criminals, smuggling contraband through a federation station and into the gamma quadrant. She had never seen a crew quite like them, a romulan, a ferengi, a human, and a strange alien. But then again, what did she have to go back to? The maquis was disbanded, the bajoran military was under federation oversight, and all she had waiting for her in the alpha quadrant was a federation penal colony.

She gulped as she took Shale's hand, trying to make her handshake firm.

What in the galaxy was she getting herself into?


End file.
